Failbetter Games’ founder now writing for Stellaris

The man responsible for Fallen London and Sunless Sea sides with Paradox.

In May, Alexis Kennedy parted ways with Failbetter Games—the studio he founded some seven years prior. The day-to-day running of the company was stifling his creative side he said—a flair responsible for the likes of Fallen London and Sunless Sea—and thus he announced he’d set his sights on pastures new. “I’ll hang out my shingle as a freelancer,” read a post on Failbetter's site at the time. “I have the entrepreneur’s bug...but I want to learn as much as I can from as many different kinds of project as I can.”

One such project is Paradox’s space-flung 4x-meets-grand strategy affair Stellaris, it appears, with Kennedy posting this over the weekend:

“When I was deciding whether to leave Failbetter or not, I took a week’s holiday to think about it. Paradox’s Stellaris had just launched, and I put forty hours straight into its maw, one after another.

“So I was very chuffed to end up talking to Paradox about doing some guest writing. As you probably know, Paradox are all about the post-launch support on their games, and I can now announce that I’m going to be writing a chunk of mid-game content for Stellaris, starting in September. This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to be doing when I started out ronin-ing; thank you to the Stellaris team for making it happen!”

As Kennedy alludes, Paradox games historically come into their own post-launch—something we’re beginning to see now with Stellaris—therefore I’m excited to see how Kennedy’s narrative prowess is instilled from this point on.

Since departing from Failbetter, Kennedy has also been working on something he doesn’t necessarily think is a game but instead is “really only a proof-of-concept of one.” It’s called Cultist Simulator and a prototype can be played this way, should you be interested in that.